Police Dispatch

Youth Must Be Served

An elite Foothills preschool was the repeated victim of vandalism evidently inflicted by a graffiti-artist dope smoker with notably immature artistic leanings, according to a Pima County Sheriff's Department report. (Either that, or it had been an inside job by a pot-smoking, marker-wielding child.)

A sheriff's deputy responded to the Valley View Early Learning Centre, 3435 E. Sunrise Drive, where the principal told him the past three weekends, someone had been on the property leaving litter, crude graffiti and marijuana debris in their wake.

The first time, she said, she'd returned to school on Monday to encounter "markered smiley faces" on all the doors and "penis drawings" on a whiteboard. The next week she'd found a mess in the shed near the playground—someone had left behind marijuana residue, a hollowed-out pen (apparently having been used as drug paraphernalia) and an apple core.

This past weekend, she said, someone had again been on the preschool property, this time drawing elaborate "cartoon-type pictures" with chalk on the sidewalk and/or floors. She'd also found ashes in the same shed where she'd earlier found marijuana residue—a shed used to store the school's tricycles, which should've been secured but had been found mysteriously unlocked, seemingly not broken into forcefully.

The deputy took photographs of the chalk drawings and the ashes for evidence, advising the principal to install security cameras and lights in the preschool so she could determine the identity of the weed-smoking cartoonist litterbug and hopefully have them arrested for criminal damage and (probably) trespassing.